The Palmer United Party leader advised students to write to Education Minister Christopher Pyne and “tell him he’s a mongrel”.

Sociologist Dr George Morgan from the University of Western Sydney may back Mr Palmer’s views, but in much more eloquent terms.

Dr Morgan says members of university executive boards back the moves to bring in more money, but those in the trenches seem them mostly as a way to limit access.

“Most university vice-chancellors now support, openly or tacitly, a free market in education, which has allowed Education Minister Christopher Pyne to claim that universities support the government’s higher education package. This is a fallacy,” Dr Morgan wrote in an article for news outlet Crikey.

“Vice-chancellors might represent universities in a formal sense, but they are not representative of the university communities, which by their nature are obstreperous.”

This groundswell of dissent from students and staff has set the scene for the emergence of a new advocacy group; the National Alliance for the Public University (NAPU).

Launched just this week, NAPU says its intention is to bring the public back into the debate on public university.

“The debate around fees is a bit of a distraction. The reforms are going to usurp the way universities operate and are run. The reforms will change the whole landscape in which universities do what universities do,” NAPU founder Ben Etherington, from the University of Sydney, said.

Education Minister Christpher Pyne was recently quoted as saying: “Each university is responsible for its own governance, but universities should avoid needless controversies that damage their reputation [and] also make Australia look less respectable to our potential international student market.”

For Dr Morgan, the willingness with which university VC’s received this message shows a growing disparity in the tiers of higher education.

“Most [Vice Chancellors] view critical social and cultural thinking as at best a necessary evil,” Dr Morgan wrote.

“This does not augur well for academic freedom if universities become more dependent on private funding.”

She argues that: “While public universities are required to protect knowledge, their leaders are charged with a more mundane set of financial obligations. Their separation from their membership has been palpable”.